Mixed Emotions! is the name of Richard Baer’s astoundingly popular comedy about two golden agers who fall in love. Since its February opening, the show has been a hit for the Broward Stage Door Theatre, which has extended it through late July. Mixed emotions might also describe a demanding theatergoer’s…
David Haskin shows off his renaissance. It’s a building first, a two-story former office complex in the murky shadows of downtown’s federal courthouse. Outside the streets are busy with the business of making money and deploying power, the proverbial hustle and bustle of the gray-flannel herds. Upstairs inside is culture…
It’s a somewhat lively weeknight on the corner of Miami Beach’s Tenth Street and Washington Avenue and sound is all around. Hip-hop blares from car stereos. Miniskirted drunken women amble along the sidewalk muttering loudly. Motorcycles transporting fat guys thunder down the road. An action-packed evening for a place that…
thursday june 17 The Florida Dance Festival continues this week, incorporating films and discussions with a bevy of dance performances. This evening at 7:00 Dancemaker, Matthew Diamond’s Academy Award-nominated documentary about the Paul Taylor Dance Company, screens at the Alliance Cinema (927 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach; 305-534-7171). Also tonight at…
Twice Upon a Yesterday seems almost too geared for the Sliding Doors crowd. By relying on the same kind of conceptual sleight of hand as that recent Brit hit (which owed a giant debt of its own to Groundhog Day), this romantic fable’s sense of originality and wit is greatly…
Pretentiousness masquerading as profundity; self-indulgence masquerading as art. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the dreadful new film from writer/director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand), joins the ranks of the worst films ever made. A statement that may, on the surface, seem harsh and heartless but that will…
While Hong Kong movies have been invading Hollywood through the success of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li, and others, mainland Chinese cinema has invaded the classier neighborhoods of the film industry during the past decade or so. The latest contender is The King of Masks, an affecting melodrama from…
Like the old adage about good campers who can start a fire with only three matchsticks, the M Ensemble Company, Inc., has struck a full blaze with Home, a production crackling with inventiveness that defies its low-budget parameters with combustible theater talent. Samm-Art Williams’s drama-in-poetry about a young Southern farmer…
Info: Much Ado About Sonnets By Robin Dougherty The two-year-old Actors’ Project Theatre Company is the first to admit that with Love’s Fire, it’s shamelessly cashing in on the current cachet of William Shakespeare. “He’s hip and young, but older crowds recognize him, too” says Irene Adjan, the company’s cofounder…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin from groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise — spoof the Sixties by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the Nineties — and danced an…
In John Sayles’s Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
In an early scene in Instinct, released by Touchstone, a division of Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close…
thursday june 10 It’s tough keeping a band together, especially when your ensemble consists of grizzled veteran musicians who know the road all too well and get antsy playing in one place too long. The sextet performing during the Van Dyke Cafe’s (846 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach) regular Thursday night…
Fascination with Cuban culture is understandable for those of us just a short jaunt from the island. But long ago the lure of the enchanting nation and its infectious music took hold of Bill Summers as a ten-year-old living in Detroit. Back then Summers was studying classical piano at a…
Wearing a white, lacy, sleeveless blouse with a matching long, flowing skirt, Elena Garcia sways from side to side, snaps her head and shoulders forward and backward, and swirls rapidly around in circles to a loud Afro-Cuban chant coming from a boombox. Looking like a cork bobbing in a tub…
If memory serves, Archie Bunker never ranted about brilliant country and western stars who experienced rapid career trajectories and died tragic deaths, possibly because none ever crossed his path. So it’s difficult to imagine what he’d think of daughter Gloria losing her head over Patsy Cline. Of course more than…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers (actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer/director Paul) that in old Gaelic culture the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end they have loaded up This Is…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man (five foot three and barely 115 pounds), but in his native country his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set fifteen world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled…
In the desert outpost of Needles, California, two pathetic, near-bankrupt used-car salesmen (writer/editor/ director/producer Joe Carnahan and producer Dan Leis) are offered a quarter of a million bucks just to hide a 1963 Pontiac LeMans for two days … without looking in the trunk. They know the deal stinks, and…
In the garden of his home in Lisbon during the Renaissance, a well-to-do elderly man talks to a young girl about life, love, and death. Three women share their day-to-day experiences and dream of better times. Another woman narrates how she did what she could to get by. These and…
thursday june 3 Most people admire Jennifer Lopez for her sizable butt and her stellar acting skills. (Who can forget that performance in Anaconda? Okay, she did do alright in Out of Sight.) But now her adoring public can learn to love Lopez for her voice. (Not that it’s anything…
Three figures covered in powdery white body paint squirm together on the floor, tying their bodies into a living knot, struggling to disentangle themselves, anxiously rolling and stretching in a mass of intertwined limbs. The woman climbs over the two men, transforming the knot into a tower, and then descends…
